European dreaming

It’s hard to believe that we have now been home for five weeks – almost as long as we were away on our European adventure. Between work, lots of exercise (I’ll save that for another post) and our regular commitments, time is flying by at a rapid pace. I’m gobsmacked that it will be March at the end of this week….how did that happen?? Ian has been quick to remind me that we were away for half of January which is contributing to the speed with which this year feels like it is passing by. In my final trip blog post about our time in Rome, I wrote that I was planning on shortly posting a big review of our trip. Sadly, between the busyness of home and exhaustion of travelling for six weeks followed by going straight back to work, I haven’t had time to do that post justice. It is definitely still coming – I want to make sure that I properly reflect on our trip, not only as a way of documenting my own memories, but to also share with you a few things that haven’t yet been shared (including images!). So, I’ll slowly plug away at it bit by bit and the post will eventually grace this blog.

Amidst the busyness, at times I have found my mind wandering back to our trip and all of the wonderful memories that we created. In many respects I’m sad that I haven’t had more time to sit and reflect on our trip as I want to hold on to the memories before they slip away into the distant past. After arriving home from Europe on a Saturday morning, I had three full days at home before heading back to work and since then it doesn’t feel as if things have stopped. Going into the trip, we knew we wouldn’t have much down time after the trip as we wanted to maximise our time away. And while I have been working hard on some of my goals for 2014 that I wrote about here, frustratingly it often my photography that has been pushed aside simply because there is no time left. This is something that I’m going to be working harder on over the next few weeks because I have big dreams in this area and they aren’t going to magically happen without lots of hard work! I’ve found that I thrive on being creative – taking photographs, editing them and even writing these posts. When I don’t have time for these things, I feel like I’m missing part of myself.

One part of the trip that I did not particularly enjoy was the 14 hour flight from Dubai to Sydney. I disliked it on our first Europe trip and despite having a little more room on the A380, I wasn’t feeling great and that flight felt like it lasted forever. I was so happy to be able to walk off that plane in Sydney and enjoy solid ground, fresh air and simply being home. For a while, the thought of getting on another plane did not interest me in the slightest, no matter what the destination was. Five weeks later, however, that feeling has changed. Yesterday morning I was up early and out running when I saw Emirates flight EK412 in the distance, preparing to land in Sydney. That was the same flight we arrived home on. Out of the blue and certainly not because I was cold (I was about 6km into a 12km run), I had goosebumps. The passion to travel and photograph the world is back, just as strong as before. While we do have more travel plans for this year, it may be some time before our next big overseas adventure. In the meantime, I’m going to be saving my pennies, dreaming of the fantastic experience we just had in Europe and contemplating our next grand adventure.

To wrap up this post, here is an image that hasn’t yet seen the light of day on this blog. It was taken on our last morning in Positano, Italy when I awoke to the sight a beautiful sunrise which I jumped out of bed to photograph.

P.S. While the blog may have suffered a bit of neglect over the past five weeks, I have been busy tweaking my website a bit. Massive thanks to Ian for helping me out with some of the trickier tweaks. While there is still a little more work to be done, I’m really happy with how this site is looking. If you haven’t had a look around for a while, please check it out and let me know what you think!